Cherokee, the sole member of the southern branch of Iroquoian languages, is a severely endangered language. Unlike other members of the Iroquoian family, Cherokee has lexical tone. Community members are concerned about the potential loss of their language, and both speakers and teachers comment on the difficulty that language learners have with…

In this paper we aim to model the organization and processing of Bangla polymorphemic words in the mental lexicon. Our objective is to determine whether the mental lexicon accesses a polymorphemic word as a whole or decomposes the word into its constituent morphemes and then recognize them accordingly. To address this issue, we adopted two…

Researchers from a variety of academic disciplines have begun to incorporate Web-based methodologies in their research agendas. Nonetheless, many of those interested in language ideologies--i.e. speakers' beliefs about language, as well as their rationalisation of those beliefs-- vehemently stand by site-specific ethnographic approaches. Rather…

Languages are tools that connect people globally and help them acquire knowledge. It is a highly critical decision to choose a language or a set of languages for inclusion in curriculum in a manner that would be most productive at personal, community and national level. What we need to see in our next generation has to be "sowed the seeds…

The apparent gap between positive attitudes and low levels of everyday usage of the language is often cited as one of the greatest challenges facing Irish language revitalisation. In a context of increasing linguistic and cultural diversity in the Republic of Ireland, this article reports on a research project which set out to explore the…

For the past three decades, momentum has gathered in favour of a multilingual turn in second language acquisition research and teaching. "Multicompetence" has been proposed to replace "nativeness" and "monolingualism" to measure L2 learners' success. This proposed shift has not made its way into L2 teaching settings.…

This paper outlines the context in which Language Awareness (LA) research is currently situated and where it might be going. The starting point is Eric Hawkins's vision (40 years ago) of LA as a bridge between school subjects and, in wider society, between people of different backgrounds and languages. Although considerable progress has been made…

This article reports an eye-tracking study on the native and non-native processing of case in Spanish. Twenty-four native and 27 first language (L1) German non-native speakers of Spanish were tested on their sensitivity to case marking violations involving structural case with objects of ditransitive verbs and to violations of inherent case for…

The aim of a discourse-pragmatic approach to teaching the indicative/subjunctive contrast in Spanish is to engage students to move beyond grammar and semantics and enter the domain of language use in complete texts. Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research have mostly focused on the morphology, semantics and syntactic aspects of…

This study aimed at investigating the preferred refusal strategies in Persian. 3047 refusals collected by 108 field workers as well as 376 refusals collected through face to face interviews were analyzed and classified according to the descriptions proposed by Liao (1994) and Liao and Bresnahan (1996). The frequencies of the resulting direct and…

The chapters in this volume, all written by experts in the field, present an array of new research on second language acquisition (SLA) that touches on several current theoretical debates in the field and present a rich range of new empirical data and a number of innovative findings. The studies address questions relating to ultimate attainment,…

In this "First Person Singular" essay, the author describes her education, teaching experience, and interest in understanding the learning of language. Anyone reading this essay will not be surprised to learn that the author's questions about language learning and optimal teaching methods were only met with further questions, and no…

According to the Integration of Multiple Patterns hypothesis (IMP; Treiman & Kessler, 2014), the spelling difficulty of a word is affected by the number of cues converging on the correct answer. We tested this hypothesis in children's regular past tense formation in Dutch. Past tenses are formed by adding either-"de"…

The present article compares and contrasts linguistic findings from longitudinal studies of low-income Americans derived from evidence of recorded family speech interactions. Hart and Risley (1995) employed research assistants who spent 1 hour per month observing language usage among families from different socioeconomic backgrounds in their homes…

This paper provides a review of oracy in primary education (5-11) in England. It discusses the nature of talk, acknowledging it as integral to the learning and teaching process and traces the history and development of the place of oracy within the curriculum. The article provides a critique of related policy initiatives including various…